Matsuoka graduated from
Musashi Senior High School in 1982 and the
University of Tokyo in 1986. In his student days, he worked for
HAL Laboratory, a Japanese video game company, and co-developed
Pinball and
Rollerball for
Nintendo Entertainment System with
Satoru Iwata. In 1989, Matsuoka became a research associate and lecturer at the University of Tokyo. In 1993, he submitted his thesis on "Language Features for Extensibility and Re-use in Concurrent Object-Oriented Languages" and acquired his Ph.D. in Science. He went on to become an assistant professor at
Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1996 and a full professor in 2001. He also became a visiting professor at the Japanese
National Institute of Informatics in 2002, and a fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery in 2011. Matsuoka was the lead developer of the
TSUBAME supercomputer program during his stay at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. On April 1, 2018, he was appointed as the new director of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS), where he oversees the development of the
Fugaku a.k.a. "Post-K" project tasked with building the successor of the
K computer. == Awards ==